


windows

by enterprisecaptainoikawa, kingdavidbowie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, M/M, Not everyone dies, knitting and drawing and all sorts of things, queer/poc au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 20:36:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4536477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enterprisecaptainoikawa/pseuds/enterprisecaptainoikawa, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kingdavidbowie/pseuds/kingdavidbowie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Really,” he says finally, turning more towards Harry now rather than scrunching away. “That’s good for you, man. I’m not judging.”</p><p>Harry stares. “Why not?” He looks honestly confused, and suddenly part of Draco’s heart feels a little broken at the edges. The idea that someone, even his rival, might not want to tell him that sort of thing because he’d say shit… makes him think of his father.</p><p>Draco crosses his arms behind his head. “I’m too tired to be a dick today. Try me tomorrow.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	windows

**Author's Note:**

> for senari's birthdayyy

1\. draco

It starts like fucking _Sixteen Candles_. Okay, so seventeen is the consequential integer in the magical world when it comes to birthdays. Draco still wishes his parents would have remembered to say happy birthday on his eighteenth. He doesn’t even give that much of a shit about gifts or anything. He just wants to hear the words. _It’s only two,_ he yells at his mother and father in internal monologue over dinner.

His mother takes another bite of some expensive meat or another while his father does the same, equally reticent. _It doesn’t even have to be “happy birthday”,_ Draco concedes. _“How was your day?” Say it._ He stares his mother down, but she only gives him a small smile before looking back down at her plate. Say it, he urges them.

“How was work today?” his mother asks his father instead, and Draco tunes out whatever is said next. He occupies himself with attempting to enjoy his meal until he’s jarred from thought by a few spare words, casually spoken but, in Draco’s head, unintentionally sharp. His blood runs cold until he realizes his father is mentioning a man he works with at the Ministry.

His father has an impressive talent for expressing much in very little. “Disgusting,” he says with just one word, and before Draco is really aware of it, he’s standing. His plate clatters where his elbow hits it.

“This bloody _meal_ is disgusting,” he says before leaving the table, not bothering to push his chair back in. He leaves the plate, too.

“Please don’t swear, Draco,” his mother says to him. He peers at her, and wonders if she knows. Is it obvious? He avoids his father’s face entirely.

He’s thought about leaving home before, but never in the real sense. Yeah, he’s made lists of what he’d take with him, dreamed up places that he’d go, imagined sticking it to his parents and stomping out, but he’s never done it. Today, he skips the consideration phase and goes straight to the leaving one. With a sack of galleons and his wand in hand, he stares out his bedroom window.

It’s not as if he has any reason to stay at Malfoy Manor, anyway. He’s just been sticking around the old place until he got a better offer, a job, that sort of thing. But none of it’s really necessary. He glances back at his bedroom door, and then out the window, and gets the dumbass idea to climb out of it instead of using the front door. He doesn’t want to have to say goodbye.

So he doesn’t. He bruises his arm catching himself after he falls halfway down the climb from his second story window. All the same, he doesn’t regret his decision in the slightest.

Draco isn’t sure where to go, though, once he’s out on the street. It’s not as if he couldn’t apparate anywhere he wanted to. He could crash at Blaise Zabini’s, yeah, but something in his gut advises him that this is a momentous occasion, his leaving, despite the fact that no one has probably actually recognized it’s happened yet. He’s a man now, on his own, no longer a horse tethered to its post. He could do anything. He is independent, without need for assistance. It’s a freeing sort of thought.

So, his old housemates are out. They’re annoying, anyway, and too close-minded for him to deal with right now. Not today. He apparates to Diagon Alley first, just to get away from Malfoy Manor, and pulls up the hood of his robes over his eyes so he’s at least not instantly recognizable as that idiot who stood on the fence during the second wizarding war and only ever managed to fuck things up further than they already were.

He’s not thinking about that now. He pushes the thoughts away and shoves past people on the street until he’s decided where to go next.

Of course, in the end, he ends up doing not what he particularly _wants_ to do, but what he figures would piss off his father. Hell, it’d alienate his from his friends, too, or whatever it is that those people are. Finding refuge in the muggle area of London is bad enough, but going to a shitty porn store to find a gay magazine really is the lowest of the low for his kind. _(The pictures don’t even move.)_ Not that he cares, especially when he’s this mad at the rest of them for being the way they are. In fact, it makes the whole ditching everyone for a bit thing that much easier.

He’s not an idiot. London is more lax than most other towns about the strange, but he’s not about to walk around the back parts of it wearing a set of neatly pressed wizard’s robes. After stopping at Gringotts to convert his money to cash, he finds a store selling muggle clothing and buys more appropriate attire for himself. Only when Draco feels adequately blended in the crowd’s gloomy-colored palette does he go looking for the store he saw once, a few years ago, when he got lost in a floo powder incident.

There are still the same peeling letters and posters on the glass storefront, the same burned out lights from before. The inside is foreign to him, but he walks in as if he’s been in these places loads of times before, his chin held high. He feels a little dumb wandering around until he finds what he wants, but once he’s there, he’s already forgotten the feeling.

There’s no _censorship_ here. Unlike the rest of the world, the magazine covers eagerly invite him in, invite him to be what he’s been covering up for years, promising good pictures, nice reads, mini calendars inside. Draco finds himself smiling in spite of his trying to keep a cool facade; he’s never been able to just reach out and take such a thing before. Thinking of his father’s cold words about the lifestyle he’s not aware his son would love to have, he grabs the raunchiest looking one.

The cashier looks asleep at the counter, but his hands still manage to key in the proper buttons. “ID?”

“What,” says Draco, “I don’t look eighteen?” He catches the man’s gaze with his own and holds it for a moment, and maybe there’s a bit of magic there, but he’s not using a spell, so it’s not as if the Ministry can call him out on it. The cashier shrugs, his eyes looking a little glazed over, and nods. Draco finds some bills and tosses them onto the counter, stuffing his change back into the pocket of his sweatshirt.

It’s a pity, he’s thinking to himself as he’s walking out, that trick doesn’t work on his parents. His black leather shoes are toeing the line, as they make their way down the crumbling sidewalk.

He doesn’t put the line here until later, when he’s holding a pencil to a sketchbook drawing another person and thinking back to this night, but it’s here—an intangible but definitely existent segment, a wall between worlds. By the time he’s crossed it, things have already altered, though he doesn’t know how. It’s here that he runs smack into something that’s probably another person, he thinks, by all logical deduction.

Backing up a step, his theory proves correct. “Bloody hell,” he goes. “Potter. Potter?”

What makes them stay standing there? Why doesn’t he keep walking? Something keeps Draco within a set radius of Harry’s space; curiosity, maybe. The man is brown and red and green and gold and Draco’s mind breathes in his colors like fresh air.

“What are you doing here?” his old classmate asks, looking just as taken aback as Draco is. His shoes stick to the same spot on the cement instead of withdrawing. He tilts his head one way, and his hair, black and twisted into yarny dreadlocks of chin length, falls in sync. With those five words, that movement, the past seven years of Draco’s life snap into place again, all the context leading up to his being here in this exact moment in this exact place. He _remembers._

Harry is a familiar face of his past. He’s still wearing those round hipster glasses that not even actual hipsters actually wear, and Draco can still glimpse the thin lightning-shaped scar above them when the man moves his head.

There are different things now, though. Different from then. For one, they’re both a little older. “You’re wearing a skirt,” Draco says, looking at it as if it were a puzzle that needed putting together to properly make sense in his mind. It’s true enough. The skirt is a rather preteen affair, a flowing red thing almost reaching Harry’s dark knees but not quite.

Potter avoids his eyes a little and says, “Yeah, pretty much.” Then he does meet Draco’s eyes, daringly, because of course, he’s as bloody Gryffindor as they get. “What do you think?” he asks, and he actually looks curious.

Draco would make a dick comment right here; he really would. But there’s something in Potter’s eyes that makes him feel like he’s being treated seriously, and he wants to return the favor.

“Just because Godric Gryffindor looked good in red doesn’t mean you do,” he says dryly at first, and thinks, _that was a dick comment anyway, you idiot,_ to himself. But Harry continues to watch him, as if he’s still listening to Draco. So he clarifies, not sure what he’s doing in the slightest.

Why is Harry Potter standing in front of him in this dilapidated area of London, of all places, of all times, of all people? Draco has no idea. The words fall out of his mouth of their own accord. “I mean, red’s nice and all…” The stopper falls out. “Try dark blue; it’d contrast nicely with your skin tone but it wouldn’t like, _pop_ or anything like a lighter shade of it would,” he says. “Unless that’s your intention, but I don’t think it is. You’re not trying to be _noticed,_ per say… Your skirt length’s hesitant, like you didn’t want to go with a floor length because obvious reasons, it’s hot out and they’re not really your thing, but you didn’t want to wear a shorter one, either. You were afraid what people would say. I’d wear it anyway,” he finds himself saying. “You could pull it off. And of course, green would match your eyes, so there’s that.” The artist in him wants to keep going, but he shoves a sock in its mouth. _You can stop rambling about color, now._

Harry doesn’t answer for a moment, and then he’s laughing, a merry, awkward laugh, like he’s a fucking Christmas elf or something. He doesn’t quite fit the bill—too tall, too gangly, too muscley, not that he’s that muscular or anything. He kind of is, though, and especially now, since Draco’s last seen him. Maybe it’s just that he’s not wearing robes draped over his figure. Maybe it’s from being on the run for a year.

“Why are you laughing again?” Draco deadpans, not a little confused, and Harry’s eyes meet his again, their green sticking out almost alarmingly against the dark brown of his skin, like the poisonous colors of reptiles trying to draw in prey. Of course, they’re bloody beautiful, but they’ve always been like that. Draco just needs to get used to it again, apparently, at least for another minute, so that he can figure out what the hell is going on right now.

“You’re so _honest,”_ Harry says finally, smiles still flashing across his lips and pulling them up at the corners. Thoughts flash over his face like fireworks. “Everyone else just told me to wear what I liked. Or to fuck off. Which I rather figured you would say, actually. Why didn’t you?”

For a moment Draco feels trapped by the question, stumped, stuck in Potter’s awful and pretty green gaze—God, he needs to get over that face, it’s been seven years, dammit. But he evades it easily, once he’s gathered his wits. “I don’t have to tell you shit, Potter,” he says irritably, and then regrets it as soon as he watches the man’s face fall. He is shit. He is such shit. But his father’s already told him that before.

He thinks of Lucius again, saying, “Disgusting, that’s what the man I work with is. He and his… _partner.”_ Draco doesn’t want to throw a pity party inside his head, but it’s hard to be ambivalent about that shit.

“You want to sit down somewhere?” he asks, as if he could counteract the evil with a bit of good. Fat chance, but he does it anyway. Potter looks a bit confused again, like he isn’t sure if Draco’s yanking his chain or what. But he shrugs, and they end up sitting on a park bench. The sky is dark by now; it’s probably nine or ten. Draco could have used the watch his father gave him a year ago today to figure that out, but he chucked it in a trash can an hour ago on an angry whim.

It was a nice watch. He never really liked it all that much.

Harry still has his, he notices. It’s older, used, but it’s very _him,_ it feels like. Draco draws his gaze up the man’s arm to his face again. They sit a decent distance apart on the bench, noticeably avoiding touching. He’s not sure who decided that, but he thinks it’s more comfortable for him this way, anyway. He’s not complaining.

They sit there for a moment in silence, and Draco tries to figure out what he’s supposed to do now. The last time he saw Harry was in the Great Hall back at Hogwarts, following the final battle. Of course, he’s seen him in the papers, but even moving photographs don’t quite capture the man before him. They don’t record him long enough to get both the kingly Gryffindor-type grace and his awkward demeanor in the same picture. Now, he’s both at once.

“Is that why you’re here, too?” he realizes. He looks up from the weeds growing between the cracks in the sidewalk. “To get away from all of them?” In the last month Harry Potter has become even more famous than he’d been as a baby, and it’s a different sort, Draco knows. Then, people had been in awe of Potter. Now he’s just a damn rockstar. It makes Draco shake his head and smirk, because he’s one of the people that knows it wasn’t like it went in the papers. _It never is, is it,_ he thinks.

The _Prophet_ likes to split its characters into two sides: good, evil. Hell, Potter’s been both, but right now he’s a saint, except when some article about him secretly being the opposite comes out. Draco isn’t sure where he himself lies. According to Rita Skeeter, he’s his father. The idea makes him snort in derision, but it also makes him feel a little sick. No, he’s not going to grow up to be _that._ He’ll do whatever it takes not to.

It’s an important decision that masks itself as a random, errant thought. He decides to try _not_ to be a dick to Potter. Not that the man’s a fucking rockstar, like the rest of the general magical populace seems to think.

After a silence Harry nods. “Yeah, pretty much.” And then his expression seems to concentrate into a more narrowed, less introspective thought. “Too?”

Which is when Draco starts backtracking, realizing he’s leaning in too close and saying too much and in need of a really strong filter for his mouth. He pointedly scoots an inch away from Potter before replying in a strong air, “My father is an asshole.”

Harry nods a few times with his eyebrows raised a little. “I kind of thought you figured the opposite for a while there.” Seven years is not a while, Draco thinks, but he doesn’t bother correcting.

“My father is rich, with—well, he _had_ a high position in the Ministry. I used to idolize that,” he says. _There._ He’s being honest, but he’s not spilling his inner thoughts all over the other man, either. “Now, I just kind of want to clock him in the nose,” he admits. Doing so is like breathing in fresh air for the first time in weeks. “So I left,” he finishes grandly.

“Just now?” Draco nods. A laughing sound escapes through Harry’s up-curved lips, and for a moment Draco smiles back, feeling rather breathless, and he feels entirely caught up in Potter again.

Then he realizes what he’s doing, how he’s feeling right now, and shoves those thoughts away, hard. And he realizes, then, that he’s holding tight onto a plastic bag with a porno magazine inside. _Shit._

He tries to subtly move the bag out of Harry’s view, but it only makes his attempt to hide it behind his back heartbreakingly obvious. Potter looks, but he doesn’t say anything, and Draco breathes a small sigh of relief when the other man looks away.

“You haven’t asked me _why_ I’m dressed like a girl,” says Harry quietly. Draco is abruptly aware of how cool the air is against his skin, how dark it is. The stars are probably coming out, he thinks.

He looks Potter up and down for the first time, not at his arms or his cheekbones but at the v-neck shirt, the skirt, the bracelets. “Not all girls wear skirts, Potter,” says Draco, crossing his arms as if it might help to hold everything inside. “What, are you trying to say something? Then spit it out.”

Harry hesitates, then says slowly, as if he’s rehearsed it dozens of times but never actually told anyone, “I’m figuring out my gender.”

Draco nods slowly, considering. “Gotcha.” Potter’s eyes are imploring him, wide orbs swiveling around Draco’s expression trying to figure out what he thinks, as if it’s that important. _It’s not,_ he wants to tell him.

“Really,” he says finally, turning more towards Harry now rather than scrunching away. “That’s good for you, man. I’m not judging.”

Harry stares. “Why not?” He looks honestly confused, and suddenly part of Draco’s heart feels a little broken at the edges. The idea that someone, even his rival, might not want to tell him that sort of thing because he’d say shit… makes him think of his father.

Draco crosses his arms behind his head. “I’m too tired to be a dick today. Try me tomorrow.” But it’s not what he wants to say, even though it makes Potter laugh a little, his tone warm, like church bells. The words fail to reach his lips, though, dying inside his mouth when he tries to release them. His lips feel dry. But—they’re smiling.

Which is weird. He has no reason to be grinning at Potter right now, yet his smile is even still expanding at the edges.

Without properly explaining, Draco passes the bag over, his face going blank, pretty much just dropping the thing into Harry’s lap. Potter looks inside after hesitating a bit, glancing over at Draco looking puzzled, and for a moment Draco feels regret, like _what the hell did he just do?_ He’s about to run for it without even taking back the magazine when a complete grin breaks across Harry’s face. Draco hesitates, ready to go if the situation calls for it.

He watches with tight fingers clenched in his sweatshirt pocket as Potter flippantly opens up the mag to a random page. The man raises his eyebrows a little, pursing his lips.

He points to a picture and shoves it in Draco’s direction. Without a care in the world for anyone who _might be looking,_ he goes, “Damn, that man has a really large d—“

“Bloody hell, don’t just— _put it on display_ for everyone to see, you idiot!” Draco hisses, smacking the pages from Potter’s hands. “Someone could see—“

“Malfoy, there’s no one here,” Harry insists.

Draco gestures to two o’clock from their bench, lowering his tone to a whisper. “There’s a man over there,” he says into Potter’s ear, suspicious. They’re so close that he can smell him, actually. Not that he is.

“He doesn’t care,” Potter assures him, and Draco just frowns.

Harry tilts his head as he looks at Draco, touching the magazine now lying in the grass with the end of his shoe. “Did you leave so that no one would find out you were gay, or so that you could _be_ it for the first time?”

“Well, that’s an invasive question,” Draco rejoins, crossing his arms.

“It is,” Potter agrees. “Maybe an easier one?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s up with _your_ outfit?”

For a minute Draco’s confused at that. He looks down at his sweatshirt and pants and goes, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man, but this looks like the height of fashion to me. What, you don’t agree?” He gives Potter an accusing glance.

The man just sort of gestures. “Because, like, you just gave me a litany of good fashion advice, but I’m questioning that now, because you’re wearing a sweatshirt with ‘London’ across the front like you just stopped in some tourist shop on the way here and spent way too much money on a shirt. And the matching pants,” he adds, looking down.

Draco stares. “Is there a _problem_ with this ensemble? Is it not vogue enough for you and your fame?”

“Just because Salazar Slytherin looked good in emerald…” Potter starts, and Draco rolls his eyes. “Nah, I just mean, you look like a rich wizard kid who never paid attention to the muggle world and decided to just… jump in on the scene. But you _don’t_ really fit in, particularly, as anything but a tourist.”

“Damn,” says Draco. “No honesty spared, huh?”

Harry blushes a little, his cheeks darkening more than they usually are, more than they are even in the dying light of the June sun. “No,” he agrees. A beat of silence passes, and Potter glances at his legs, dark and hairy under the skirt, and Draco. His gaze settles on a streetlamp a few meters off. “I’m taking the summer to figure things out before I start working an auror,” he says, almost all the humor gone from his voice. Draco finds himself captivated again, listening.

“I never had the time to, you know?” says Harry. His lips curve into a small frown. “I mean, of course you do.” Yeah, he does. “But I’ve always had so many questions. I’ve never really fully understood myself, what I am, what I want to be, how I want others to see me.” Potter comes back to himself jarringly, grimacing. “I’m dropping all my shit on you.”

“I’d complain if I was bored,” Draco points out.

“I know,” Harry says, and smiles again. “I guess I’m just… reconsidering myself. All this ‘boy who lived’ deal—I don’t even know why you’d say that. What makes me a boy? I mean, there’s the physical part…”

“Yeah.”

“But that’s just the container for all the me inside, isn’t it?” Harry says, and Draco opens his mouth a little, kind of surprised, because he’s never thought of it like that before.

“Yeah,” he says again, nodding. “That makes sense, actually.”

They sit in the dim light for a few moments without saying anything, just looking around and feeling a hell of a lot more relaxed than they did ten minutes ago. Hell, Draco feels more at ease sitting next to Potter now than he’s ever been with the guy in his life. _Funny thing about telling people about yourself,_ he thinks. _The truth, and all that._

“So you live around here, huh?” he asks finally. There’re a lot of apartment buildings surrounding the park.

“A few blocks that way,” Harry says, pointing down the street. “What about you?”

Draco has to think about the question when he realizes he doesn’t have an immediate answer anymore. “Um,” he says. He doesn’t have a good follow-up.

Potter starts laughing again, the git, and Draco glares, except the look isn’t convincing at all. “Wait,” says the man, holding up a hand. “So you ran away—“

“I’m of age, you know,” Draco cuts in.

“You _left,_ then, and instead of looking for somewhere to stay, you… bought porn. What was your plan, to sit on this bench and wank off until morning?”

“You’re such a fucking asshole.” He rolls his eyes and snatches up the magazine, and holds it protectively to his chest, still not serious. It’s impossible to be, he’s realizing, with this newish version of Harry. “I was getting to that part,” he rejoins. “The place to stay part, I mean, not—shit. You know what I mean.” Harry cracks up again, and has to take a minute to slow his breathing back to normal and stop laughing. “You really are…” Draco mumbles, and Potter’s lips turn up into another smile.

“Are you there yet?” Harry sounds more serious now, not kidding around. “To that part?”

“I guess not,” Draco admits. He glances down. “I mean, I kind of like this bench.”

Which is how he ends up spending the night in Harry Potter’s flat, on a cheap couch covered in old blankets. His bed at Malfoy Manor is ten times as comfortable at least, but he’s never felt better. He falls asleep with Harry sitting in the chair next to him, watching telly with the volume on low. It’s very peaceful, actually. Draco hasn’t felt this calm in years.

2\. harry

Harry holds a hand in front of his face and watches the spray of water from his shower hit it, watches the droplets slide down his arm. He stares at the water, then at his legs. He shaved them a few weeks ago until they were smooth but the hair has since grown back. He’s not sure if he likes them better when they feel like silk or when they feel like he’s running his hand through a field of coarse grain, or grass. There’re pros and cons to both, and now that he’s really considered the question— _to shave or not to shave?_ he thinks with a small smile playing across his lips—he feels fairly overwhelmed by all the possibilities. If he’s not confined to masculinity, he’s not sure how to define himself anymore. So now his shopping trips involve crossing back and forth across the line between men’s and women’s clothing, going, “Shit, that’s a nice shirt!” without regard for its intended wearer. It’s overwhelming, yeah, definitely. But it makes him feel inexplicably happy, crossing the lines. He just wishes they weren’t there in the first place. He’s never really seen their point.

He uses his palms to roll a dreadlock that’s hanging down in front of his face, dripping down onto his nose. If there’s one aspect of his body that he’s certain he likes, it’s his skin color, at least. His mother was pale-skinned, at least in all the pictures he has, but Harry takes after his father, looking less half-black and maybe more three-quarters or something. The mixture of palettes onto his body as a canvas pleases him sometimes, like his parents are still present in his skin tone, stirred together into another thing altogether. Having origins makes him feel less alone, if he ever does feel like that.

Harry switches off the water in the shower and steps out. There’s a man asleep on his couch, and it’s _Draco Malfoy,_ of all the people that could have ever ended up there. He has to take a minute to recollect his memories and recall how exactly that happened. When he does, he still isn’t entirely sure how it did.

Malfoy seems different, now, although now that Harry has a context to put him in, he realizes that Malfoy _has_ been changing a lot in the last few years. He thinks of Draco in sixth year at Hogwarts, his eyes red and his blond hair messy, his head plagued by Voldemort, his father, himself. Harry had hated that Draco, so he’s not sure what’s so different now that he feels entirely calm at the idea of the man sleeping in his flat. Maybe it was his year on the run, when he’d ended up at the Malfoys and Draco hadn’t ratted him out. Maybe it was seeing Narcissa, so different than her husband, declaring Harry dead to the rest of Voldemort’s followers after asking after her son. If she could care that much about a man easily passing for a total git…

But it’s not really any of that, Harry knows. He thinks it’s because they talked, and they were serious with each other for once, like adults, kind of—he snorts quietly, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, thinking of Draco in touristy muggle’s clothing. The fact that it’s not even his imagination but what he’s probably still wearing now makes Harry’s grin widen even further. He presses a fist to his mouth so that his laugh won’t be heard through the door, although he just smiles. It feels audible anyway.

Draco probably needs something to wear, he realizes, now that he’s thinking about that. He’s not sure what the man’s plan is, not sure if he hasn’t just slipped out while Harry was in the shower. _I’m not a very good host,_ he thinks, and dries himself quickly before pulling on a pair of jeans and a red t-shirt. He only spends a quick moment looking at himself in the mirror before opening up the door—he has on a fairly androgynous outfit in and of itself, if only in its plainness, but he looks like a man, of course. Unshaved, light stubble on his jawline, flat chest, masculine features. He’s attractive, or he thinks he is, anyway, but he’s not sure if he’s _himself._ Not sure how to change things so that he _is._

It’s almost better, easier, to have something else to think about. Otherwise, he’ll just spend the whole day overthinking himself, getting nowhere, and getting afraid, even, after a while. He tries not to think about that.

When he walks into the living room area he finds Draco still there, awake now, sitting up in the couch with his knees to his chest. He’s just sitting there and not moving, not doing anything at all.

“Hey,” says Harry. He feels like he’s interrupting somehow, and feels not a little awkward about it.

Draco’s features seem to snap out of absentia, switching from spacey and far away to narrowed and concentrated. Expression plays over his face like a film where there was previously just a blank, white screen. “Good morning,” he says, and looks a little surprised to be sitting where he is. He seems to take a minute to look around at Harry’s flat, curious. Harry lets him.

“Do you have any food?” Malfoy asks after a bit, glancing up.

Harry scrunches up his nose. “Were you in doubt that I did?”

“I don’t know, man,” Draco says, shrugging. “I don’t see any house elves around. That’s where the food comes from, right?”

“You’re being sarcastic,” Harry presumes.

“Extremely. I did say to wait until morning, didn’t I?” Draco’s smirk melts away after a moment as he takes in his surroundings again. _And now to the awkward morning-after part,_ Harry thinks. They hadn’t even done anything last night and it’s still awkward. But he’d bared himself in a different way, when he thinks about it. Draco is the first person he’s actually talked to about his plan, as bloody weird as that is in the first place. Switching back to small talk is, in comparison, really very strange.

“Do you even know how to cook?” Harry asks. “Like, you didn’t just spend the last seventeen years of your life being cleaned up after and cooked for by maids and house elves?” He’s not entirely kidding, really. Honestly, he wouldn’t be surprised.

Malfoy rolls his eyes at that, though, and it’s such a casual, friendly expression compared to everything Harry’s ever seen him as that he wants to grin from cheek to cheek. He wonders if it’s from telling Harry about his being gay. Harry had felt the same way with Ron and Hermione after telling them he was pansexual, like their friendship had leveled up now that all the secrets were out. It was a happy feeling, and Harry smiles just remembering it. They hadn’t minded. Merlin, he’d been so excited. He can see the same thing in Draco’s eyes.

“As a matter of fact, asshole,” the man says, “I’m a fairly decent cook. I’ve learned from the best back at home. What can you cook?” he asks, reflecting the question back at Harry.

“Me?” he says, touching his chest. “I live off of ramen noodles. I don’t even use the stove. The microwave is my best friend.” He’s always had to fend for himself, yeah, at the Dursleys, but it hasn’t actually been any help ever. He’s not good with food, art, that sort of deal. It’s inherent. Besides, what could he cook that would ever taste better than restaurant and fast food, meals from carts and stands on the streets of Italy? Taking that trip this month has spoiled him, he knows, but he doesn’t mind that, either, to be honest.

“Dammit, Harry, stop talking shit, then,” Draco says, shaking his head and laughing, and Harry really ought to pull his wand on the man for saying that, for calling him a dick like a dozen times in the last twelve hours, for the last seven years of their lives, or _something._ But he’s laughing, too, stupidly enough. Because Malfoy’s always been like that, saying rude things and never meaning them.

He’d found out Harry was pan sometime during fifth year at Hogwarts, Harry recalls. Thinking back on it, Draco had been curiously quiet regarding that particular aspect of Harry Potter. He’d certainly insulted Harry’s clothes and friends enough. He wonders when the derogatory words first started to lose their meaning—as early as first year, or just yesterday? Draco really had hated him sometimes, especially in sixth year. But it’d been a desperate, anxious hate, Harry thinks. Situational more so than because of Harry himself, or so he’d kind of like to imagine.

He wonders what would have happened between them had he been sorted into Slytherin, too. He wonders what the hell is happening even right now, as they sit in his flat laughing again. Again, since yesterday, anyway. He feels like he’s wandered into an alternate dimension, met a different Draco Malfoy. Of course, the man is obviously himself. No one else would be so proud and vain about such a touristy-looking “ensemble”, as he called it.

Speaking of clothes, though—“Hey, do you need a shirt or something?” Harry asks.

Draco gives him a wry look at first. “Do you own anything that isn’t red or gold?”

“Funny,” he says, and wonders for a moment if he even does. “I’ll be back in a sec.” He ducks into his bedroom, coming out a minute later with jeans and a black t-shirt. He tosses them over to the couch, and Draco catches the wad of fabric with relative ease.

“You want to go eat or something?” Harry asks.

“That was a very circular conversation,” Draco rejoins. “It only took ten minutes for us to get back to breakfast. Which I could do with, by the way, yeah.” His eyes sparkle with mirth, contentment. “Um. I’ll change in the bathroom,” he says, more awkward on that topic than the previous one. He brushes past Harry and closes the door behind him, avoiding Harry’s eyes in some mercurial anxiety.

Harry eyes the door with a little trepidation yanking at his heart beat. He realizes while doing so that he’s waiting for something normal to happen and make all this, whatever it is, end. Part of him thinks that Malfoy will open up the bathroom door again, stride out and shove his wand under Harry’s chin, hex him and leave.

The man comes out looking surprisingly middle-class muggle for a Malfoy. Draco’s hair is still a little messy and uncombed, his eyes dark with circles underneath from lack of proper sleep. There’s an anxiety to his expression at the thought of leaving the flat and going back out in public, Harry realizes. Draco doesn’t say anything, though.

“You look alright.” Harry nods, keeping his distance as to not make Draco uncomfortable. It seems to do at least a little good, he thinks. He stares, though, noticing new things about Malfoy now that he himself is looking at the man in a different way than he has before. “Are you Asian?” he asks.

“A bit, yeah,” answers Draco. He seems relieved to be getting an easy question. “On my mother’s side.”

“It’s in your features,” says Harry. They’re sharper than his, more defined and narrow. He’d always attributed it to the traditional Malfoy look before, blond and caustic like the Weasleys were red-haired and Scottish, but he can see it now, Draco’s origins, or part of them, anyway. He wonders if they’d have turned out any different had they been switched at birth, grown up with different parents, or a lack thereof. He’s not sure anymore, he thinks. About anything, really.

The diner they’re sitting at a half hour later is an older one, but cheap, with decent food. The waitress on duty greets Harry by name, and he tosses her a quick wink before guiding Draco over to the booth where he usually sits. She doesn’t know him for what he’s done—just because he comes here a lot. It’s nice. _She’s_ nice.

“Is she your girlfriend or something?” Malfoy asks when she’s gone.

Harry raises his eyebrows. “No. Does it seem like that?”

Draco shrugs. “Just curious.”

A small revelation hits Harry just then. He narrows his eyes, trying to figure Malfoy out. In the end, he just asks. “You’re not hitting on me, are you? Like, is that what this whole thing is?”

Draco snorts. “No. No. What, a gay and pansexual man—um, person? Whichever you… prefer—we can’t just hang out platonically without it being me hitting on you? _Harry Potter?_ Ridiculous thought, that is.”

His voice is loud, like he’s overacting, but Harry opts not to point that out. “Just curious,” he says. “But that’s why you told me, about you.”

Draco’s lips tug into a little bit of a frown. “I knew _you’d_ understand. Probably. Even more so after you bared your whole _identity_ to me.”

Harry’s eyes fix on his hands, lying in his lap. “You’re pretty much the only one I’ve told that,” he admits. _The only one who knows, now, since Tonks._ It’s a weird thought that he’d only realized this morning.

Malfoy mumbles a swear word, looking honest to god confused at that, and maybe a little troubled, too, oddly enough. “What, you haven’t even told Granger and Weasley? The hell, man?” In response to Harry’s pointed look, he says hurriedly, “Yes, I’m a complete hypocrite, too, because I haven’t told anyone shit and I’ve known I was gay since like third year or something. At least I can cook, what can you do?”

He knows Draco doesn’t actually expect him to answer, but Harry considers the question anyway. “I can drive a stick shift,” he offers. “And I’ve been learning how to knit.” Dumbledore had left him his old knitting magazines in his will.

Malfoy actually looks a little impressed at that. “So you can make like, sweaters and shit?”

“Well, no,” Harry says, and if he looks half as sheepish as he feels it’s enough. “I’ve only figured out rectangles, you see.”

Draco stares. “What the hell are you gonna do with those?”

“Scarves are rectangles,” Harry rejoins quickly, crossing his arms defensively. “Just really long ones, you see.”

“It’s June; what are you going to do with a knitted scarf?”

“Stop poking at my plot holes, you dick,” he says, grimacing. He makes a point not to acknowledge the truth to the man’s words. “Looks like you won’t be getting one, now.”

“Because you were so in the process of knitting me a scarf. Emerald and gray, I presume?”

“I started it last night, and of course it is; you wouldn’t wear anything else, would you? But I might just have to toss it now, I think, because you’ve got that really ungrateful look on your face again…”

“Again?” Malfoy echoes. “What’s that supposed to mean, bruv?” Harry snorts at the word. “You think I’m some ungrateful rich prick, or something?”

Then the thing their ostensibly cross words have been building up to collapses in on itself again, and a smile splits Draco’s lips in two like a crack down the cherubic face of the cold, marble statue that he is no longer, not now. Harry wonders if there was only ever a few lines between his being Draco’s rival and his friend, only a few words that could have easily sent that brick wall sprawling into dust. He thinks of Berlin, of Sirius and Remus’s stories about that wall falling down. This is nothing of that magnitude, but it makes Harry start to really understand the look on his godfather’s face when he told stories like that about things that happened when he was younger. Another barrier of not entirely understanding, a little broken now.

“I kind of like to draw,” Draco says on the walk back to Harry’s flat, after a period of walking in silence that should probably feel uncomfortable to Harry but isn’t, not at all.

“I take it you’re a regular Raphael,” Harry presumes. “In addition to the cooking, of course.” _I’m staying with Hannibal Lecter,_ he thinks, a small smile on his full lips.

“I meant that one seriously,” mumbles Malfoy. “I’m sort of shite at it, yeah, but I do it a lot. Haven’t really showed that many people.”

Harry feels like a dick now for making light of it. “That’s actually really cool,” he says as they get to the door to his apartment building, slowing. “I’m an asshole,” he says as they’re stepping inside, breathing in lungs full of cold, air conditioner air.

He’s expecting Malfoy to agree with him, throw back another barb, but he doesn’t. Draco shakes his head, smiling just slightly, maybe a little sadly. “Nah,” he says. “I’ve met my fair share of assholes, and you’re alright, Harry.” Malfoy looks just as surprised as Harry after the words have tumbled out through his lips. But the man just shrugs, as if that’s as true as it gets.

They end up standing outside Harry’s door, lingering in the hall. _This is where it’s supposed to end,_ Harry realizes. He wishes he’d realized it earlier so that he could have said something more meaningful over breakfast instead of just dumb shit about his learning knitting, partly in honor of their old Hogwarts headmaster. He thinks of all the things he’s wished he’d said to Dumbledore, all the times he’s regretted not asking, not telling, not being there, not understanding. Merlin, he hopes this won’t end up like that. He’s not sure he could deal with more of that.

Harry _doesn’t_ regret anything he’s told Malfoy, though. There’s more to say, yeah, infinitely so, but he won’t feel remorse tomorrow, he doesn’t think. And he won’t go back to hating on Malfoy, either. He pictures them in twenty years with families, passing each other at King’s Cross while they drop their respective children off to take the Hogwarts Express for the first time. If he’d ever done that before, he’d picture something like the looks Ron’s father and Lucius Malfoy gave each other on the street. It hasn’t even been a day, but it’ll be different now, Harry thinks. _It’s funny how such a small amount of time can change that much of the rest of it._

“I was wrong,” Harry says.

Draco shakes his head again at that. “No, you were right. I wasn’t faking being an arse for seven years, you know. And I was wrong, too, if you ever were.”

“What, you didn’t love me the whole time?” Harry asks. A smirk plays across his lips like a quiet melody. “Damn, I’ve been mistaken.”

Draco smiles, looking a little anxious. Harry almost invites him to stay, but then the man goes, “Well—see you around,” and it’s too late. He’s gone.

It feels abrupt, his leaving, but Harry’s glad it happens quickly. He watches at Malfoy disappears down the staircase, probably not sure where the hell he’s going. He has a wand, though. He can apparate, defend himself. _He’ll be safe,_ Harry assures himself.

So Harry’s back on his own, now. It shouldn’t feel so strange, he thinks. It’s only been a day, remember? Now that day’s over, and that’s okay. He doesn’t need someone else to figure himself out. There’s something peaceful, anyway, about being alone again, not having to worry about how to present himself. Truth be told, though, he hadn’t worried at all about what Draco might think. In a way, the fact that he’d started out not giving a shit about what Malfoy thought of him had made him more comfortable with the man than he was with his friends, in some ways. A curious thought.

He’s just resigned himself to Draco’s absence when he hears someone pressing the buzzer to his apartment on the outside door. Harry hops up from his couch and presses the speaker button.

“Hello?” he says. He sounds curious, maybe even confused as to who it might be, but, glancing back at the sofa, a smile is already spreading across his lips.

“Yo, I left my porn magazine in your flat,” says Draco through the speaker. He doesn’t whisper, and there’re still remnants of a smile in his dry tone. Harry buzzes him inside, listens for the beat of Malfoy’s feet on the staircase, opens up the door when he hears the sound halt.

“You can keep the clothes, if you want,” he says, remembering that he’d meant to say that before. He hands the magazine over to Draco, still grinning at the ridiculously ostentatious cover. Their fingers brush when Malfoy takes it, and for a moment, Harry’s imagining a different sort of twenty-year plan in his head. Only for a fleeting second.

“Good luck,” Harry says, meaning it.

“Thank you.” Draco pauses. “We should meet up sometime.”

“Yeah,” Harry agrees. He has to make an effort to keep his face a blank slate. “Owl me?” he asks, smiling, and Malfoy nods.

A year passes, though, before they meet again.  
  
3\. draco

Okay, so Draco is trash for never owling Harry. It’s been long enough, yeah, that the other man’s probably forgotten the whole deal that happened in the first place. His guilty conscience still pricks at his brain at times, unabated by any sort of rational thought. He gives his owl, sitting in her cage on his desk, another apologetic look. As if she actually cared about never delivering one of the letters Draco’s just found in the back of his desk.

He thought he’d thrown them all away, after he’d started writing and then later never actually sending the letters, stuffing them in his desk instead. He’d been drawing contour lines of his feet, propped up on his desk chair where his thighs were tucked under his sketchbook. He’d broken the tip of his pencil, searched around for the sharpener in his desk. It’d been wrapped in a page of a forgotten letter. He stares down at the ink scrawled on parchment, looking more at his handwriting, shakier than it should be, than the words themselves.

 _Stupid letters._ They’d been a waste of time, a waste of heart; he hadn’t even kept them as records of the past year. After a while he knew he was never going to send the damn things, kept going anyway. Then, he just wrote everything in them.

 _I have nightmares all the time where my father finds out I’m gay,_ the remnant reads. Draco stares down the ink on parchment, remembering this one as his eyes scan down the page, skimming, then faltering in speed. He ends up just reading the damn thing. _I try to hide it, every time, but he always finds out—finds a book, a magazine, a man that betrays my true self to him. I don’t think my mother would be as unaccepting, but she is in my nightmares. I hate sleeping. Sometimes Blaise stays up with me—we’re sharing a flat in London, now. We play chess, or cook desert, or walk around the block, and I’m incredibly thankful for it. Funny how such an asshole can also be so nice. But you get that, right? Ha. I’m not sure which one of us I’m even talking about._

 _I’m glad I don’t live alone,_ he goes on. _I’m glad Blaise wasn’t an asshole when it mattered the most._

_You’d better be doing well, Potter. I’m still wishing you good luck with figuring yourself out; I think it all the time. Wish on shooting stars and all that shit, the whole deal. Merlin, that’s fucking cheesy. I’m not sending this. Another one to add to the pile, I guess. Damn. But I can probably say even worse things now, if I want to._

_It’s too late; I missed the bus on this one, I guess. It’s almost Christmas. I wish I hadn’t missed the bus. I really do hope you’re doing well. ~~Yours, Always, Forever in this purgatory, Shit I’m just sorry for never owling you man,~~ Draco ~~Malfoy~~._

God, his dumb letters make him want to cry, or something. Draco allows himself a small sigh, a brief moment of feeling like shit for screwing up, before he pulls out his wand to set fire to the damn thing. He breathes in, out, slowly, like he’s practiced. It’s alright. Harry was a long time ago, last summer, and yes, he was important, he was _very important,_ and Draco doesn’t think he’d be here without getting a little of the man’s courage and explorative nature rubbed off on him back then. But that night was a lifetime ago, and Potter’s probably forgotten all about it by now. It’s about time that Draco does the same. He’s not one half of a person without the man, or anything.

A knock sounds off on the door to his bedroom, somehow lazy and neat at the same time. “Come in,” Draco mumbles. A half-hearted spark is falling from his wand as Blaise opens the door, peeks inside. Draco hesitates, looking up.

“Don’t tell me you’re going to start our flat on fire again,” the man drawls, leaning on the doorframe without coming inside. Draco will never cease to be amused by how different Blaise Zabini is on the outside compared to the inside. His dark, Italian eyes look lethal as shit, narrowed in the same stormy-looking expression whether he’s thinking angry thoughts or about shitty cat memes. His hair is shaved almost strictly straight, his black skin perfectly unblemished. Draco thinks that he likes to psych people out, which is… questionable. But he’s seen too much of the man’s good side to ever think something bad of the flatmate who’s quickly become his best friend in the last year.

“That was _one time,_ Blaise, get over it,” he says, an equal amount of lackadaisical to his tone. Which is pretty much what he and Blaise _do,_ regarding their friendship—compete to see who can act like they give less of a shit about things, and then comfort the other when they actually do. It’s a little circular, maybe, but it suits them. “What,” he goes, “a man can’t start a small fire within the vicinity of his own bedroom? Damn. England really has gone to the dogs.”

He tosses the piece of parchment away, but it doesn’t fall into oblivion like he imagined for a foolish second that it might. It basically lands right on Blaise’s bare, dark feet. Draco can hardly blame his flatmate for picking the piece up, as much as he wishes the man hadn’t. He’s too disillusioned with himself to fight for the damn thing. Rather than that, he rolls up into a ball on his bed like the crumpled letter and stares at his friend, daring him to read it.

But he doesn’t. Blaise points his own wand at the piece of parchment and they both watch as it explodes into tiny flames, then sparks that fade off into nothingness. Draco feels a little lighter now, now that all the letters are gone—he’s not going to write any more; he’s already decided that if anything, he’d sooner write a damn diary on the back pages of his sketchbook—but the stupid feeling, the original one, is still tight inside his chest.

If he’s being honest, it’s not even Harry’s fault. He pins it all on the man, but his innermost worries and fears aren’t a result of the influence of _Harry Potter._ No, that’s all Draco.

Blaise looks like he’s waiting for Draco to say something; he’s just lingering there in the doorway with mild expectation in his eyes. “What?” Draco demands finally, crossing his arms.

His flatmate opens his mouth to answer, then seals his lips and shakes his head, a smile on his face. Cryptic. “Come into the kitchen,” he says instead, gesturing Draco toward the door, as if he doesn’t know where the damn thing is.

Draco frowns at himself, tries to shake off his irritation. He’s not going to reflect all of his awful self-loathing at Blaise. He follows his flatmate into the kitchen; he’s staring at the table set up in the middle of the tile when the date dawns on him. June the fifth. _Who would’ve known?_

“Happy birthday, man,” Blaise says mildly. Nineteen candles, all of them lit. Little flames, like all the burned letters. His flatmate looks even more surprised than Draco had been a moment earlier when his arms envelop Blaise in an abrupt hug.

“Merlin, you’re bloody tall,” Draco mumbles. He’s almost talking into the man’s chest. They break apart grinning and swearing.

He pauses before blowing out the candles. What he wishes for is important—how this year is going to go is dependent on this moment, just like last year had depended on Harry. But Draco’s not putting all his eggs in someone else’s basket this year, not going to spend another year regretting shit and revolving around a nonexistent sun. He intends to do what he should have done in the first place, and wishes himself luck.

“We’re eating cake for breakfast,” Draco muses a minute later, his mouth full of the taste of being nineteen. “How unhealthy.”

Blaise raises his eyebrows. “Does that bother you?”

“Me? You know I don’t give a damn,” Draco says, and he’s smiling. His flatmate looks confused as all hell, especially when he jumps up from his seat and heads off to his room. His steps are bouncing ones.

Before closing the door behind him, he turns. “Are you doing anything today?”

Blaise winks, an expression he usually reserves only for flirting. “I’m all yours,” he says.

“Good,” says Draco. A breath in, then out. He is calm. “We’re going to visit my parents.”

He tries to concentrate more on the little parts of that than the bigger one. He takes it in steps—first, he has to change out of his nightclothes.

 _One._ He wonders what to wear for a while, peering inside his closet at all of his robes hanging, dark things that remind him of funeral shrouds. Clothes he grabbed back from Malfoy Manor after spending the night at Harry’s, when he’d come back to officially inform his parents that he was moving out.

“Where will you be staying?” his father had asked. Lucius and Narcissa both sat at the dining table where they’d been eating—it seemed like they were always there, like a family in a painting—while their son stood in the doorway coming in from the grand foyer. He was still wearing Harry Potter’s faded jeans with the bottom hems worn to ripped.

“Goyle has a flat in London,” he’d answered. Of course, that’d all gone to hell later, and he’d almost apparated straight back to Potter’s place afterwards, wanting a shoulder to cry on. He hadn’t wanted to cry so much as insult someone and maybe break a few noses, though. So he’s sort of glad now he hadn’t. Harry doesn’t deserve that sort of reunion, he thinks.

He timelines those events in his head: Draco coming out to Goyle, the following altercation, Goyle telling Blaise, Blaise socking Goyle in the nose. The following bloody nose. The following in which Blaise found Draco and suggested they share his flat, benefits including tolerance and bad jokes, including but not limited to cat pictures and incomprehensible memes.

All things considering, Draco’s life has basically been a shitty television drama. It’s not really anything new, when he thinks about it.

In the end he comes out of his room to find Blaise lying across their couch, donning a loose, summery set of robes and lazily eyeing the TV set Draco had bought last autumn. His flatmate looks him up and down, at the jeans, the tennis shoes, the shirt. He looks like a muggle, and that’s his intention—he’s more than fed up with dressing up to please people, especially his parents. Harry’s shirt is comfortable as hell; Draco really has to get more of these things, and besides that, he feels a little braver wearing it. _One down. Now, step two._

“I’ve never seen you wear that before,” Blaise says, looking at Harry’s shirt. “You usually use it as a pillowcase, right? I always see you cuddling it in your sleep.” Draco winces in spite of himself.

He pushes two quieting fingers to his friend’s lips as the man gets to his feet. “Do not speak of my sleeping habits, friend,” he says in a whisper, catching Blaise’s eyes in a mockingly serious gaze. His flatmate rolls his eyes and backs out of Draco’s space, gets the door and bows his allegiance to Draco.

“Out you go, sir,” he says, and shuts the door behind them. He locks it with a quick charm pointed at the knob. “Muggle habit,” he admits after a moment, while they’re linking arms. “Could’ve just apparated from inside, really.”

“I like this better,” says Draco. “We don’t need any of that pureblooded crap, anyway. Doors are great.”

“Right, man.” Blaise is still giving Harry’s old t-shirt curious looks. “Is it from a booyyy?” he asks tauntingly, a smirk spreading his lips. He’s probably not being serious, Draco knows, just teasing, but his face still goes a little pink, anyway.

“Let’s go,” he says. In one moment, they’re in the hallway; next, their surroundings consist of high hedges and mown lawns and wandering peacocks, one of which comes up to Draco and pecks at the bottom hem of his jeans.

He smiles at the creature. “Hey, bruv,” he mumbles. The bird just squawks at him before ambling away.

“Welcome home,” Blaise says, laughing. Draco is, too, feeling almost lighthearted, right up until he looks up and his eyes find the house. Malfoy Manor.

Okay, so he’s a little freaked. Very much so, actually. But he’s got this. As afraid as he is of going inside to find his parents, there’s no way he’s leaving. His feet carry him forward, as if his deepest desire to be safe is tugging him closer to his end, grabbing him by the shirt.

 _Worst thing that happens,_ he reminds himself, _is Mother and Father cut me off completely. I’ll have to get a job or something. Might not be bad. The flat can get boring, me just sitting there on the couch watching dramas on telly and cooking dinners every day. Maybe I need a change like that._

Blaise gives him a side-eye. “Are you internally monologuing again?”

“I’m distracting myself from this situation,” he answers, a little discombobulated, but mostly just tense and anxious. He taps his wand on the front gate and watches it open up for them.

“I’m distracting,” Blaise protests. “Do _you_ know how to interpretive-dance? I think not.”

Draco stares at his now-writhing flatmate, stuck between breaking out in guffaws and rolling his eyes. He ends up giggling, then slapping a hand over his mouth. “You’re such a damn nerd,” he says. “How the hell did you end up in Slytherin?”

“I killed a man,” says Blaise idly, examining his nails as he straightens his walk into a perfect stride, abruptly switching from complete bloody dork to smooth-talking, pureblooded rich kid. Draco still has no idea how the hell he does that. And he’s still not sure if Blaise is serious or not about that other part. He sighs, and knocks on the front door to his old house.

 _Three._  
  
4\. harry

Harry feels whole with the June sun saturating his skin, while he’s standing out on the sidewalk breathing fresh air through his nose. He doesn’t take nearly enough walks, he thinks, not lately. Last summer he took them all the time, lengthy things in the evenings where he tried to sort out all his cluttered thoughts by adding even more details to each one. Now, they’re less stress-inducing, at least. They’re not as necessary as they were before, but he realizes while he’s out here that he really does love being outside. He ought to get out more often.

He’s only worn this tank top a few times—Harry is brave, yeah, but he’s not Godric Gryffindor. He wonders if the founder of his old house ever wore floral prints. They probably weren’t in style a few hundred years ago, he considers. He can’t imagine them as a fad, though, not now. Why would anyone in the future _not_ want to wear a tank with light orange lilies all over it?

He loves this shirt, anyway, so damn much, and Sirius and Remus are always cool with whatever he wears, so he’s going with it, despite the looks some people give him and his jean shorts. Despite the fact that there’ll be another article in the  _Prophet_ or _Witch Weekly_ talking about his gender identity. To be honest, he doesn’t mind the ones that just judge his clothing; sometimes, they’re humorous. Even helpful, on occasion. It’s an occupational hazard.

And okay, if it’s in the right way, he doesn’t mind the first thing, either. After passing the auror tests he’d told Kingsley Shacklebolt he didn’t want the job if the new minister wouldn’t accept him being his entire self, and the man had listened impartially to Harry’s explanation of his being agender. He hadn’t wanted to lie. Of course the whole thing was prime gossip, and he’d went along with it for a while, eager to provide more visibility for his identity, to make the revamped (again) Ministry of Magic a little more tolerant place. Hermione and Ron had been his staunch allies at work, the former defending him with her words and the latter, by hexing a wizard who’d been rude to Harry. _And not just once,_ Harry recalls with a small wince.

“Ron,” Hermione had said with a sigh in the ministry cafeteria, once they’d sat down, “You can’t make everyone who calls Harry a—“

“Fag,” Harry supplied helpfully when she trailed off. He’d long since grown used to the word, but it still really bothered her, he knew, when people said things like that. Not just about him, either. She was the sort that would have defended someone like Harry even if they hadn’t been friends. Ron was ambivalent, he thought, but immensely loyal towards his friends and family. The two of them were different, but the same, in the end. Harry wondered if they ever recognized their similarities.

His friend grimaced at Ron. “You can’t just make them all vomit slugs,” she went on finally, giving her boyfriend a pointed look.

Ron raised his eyebrows over the sandwich he was just bringing to his lips. “And what would you have done, then?” All three of them knew, of course, that she’d never let a comment slide. _She’d call him out,_ Harry thought at the time. _Point out all the flaws in his argument, as much as a word is a thesis, anyway._

But she’d smiled slightly, painfully, then, tucked some of her dark, thick hair behind an equally black ear. “Something more suited to the crime, as Shakespeare might suggest. I would have hexed his mouth _closed._ At the very least, I would have gone with something a little less simpleminded than ‘Eat slugs, dickhead.’” Ron stifled a laugh, because even Hermione was grinning a little. Harry didn’t smile, though, just eyed his lunch tray and avoided looking up to see who was staring. Despite all prior experience, he still felt awkward being put on the spotlight. He sneaked a glance out of the corner of his eye at the new intern throwing up gastropods into the trash and winced again.

“I feel bad,” he admitted to his friends.

 _“You_ didn’t hex him,” Hermione reminded him. She put a hand over his, a comforting gesture. “It’s okay, Harry.”

He’d nodded. “Yeah. It’s just—I don’t wear both men and women’s clothing to be _noticed._ Just to be more comfortable, more… Harry, I guess. I just wished I blended in more.” He never had, of course, except for a few years at Hogwarts, in the parts where everything _hadn’t_ been going to hell. Hermione gave him a sympathetic look, and Ron did his best attempt at one for his best friend’s sake.

“All these arses make me miss Malfoy, sometimes,” the man said. “Was he as bad as some people we’ve met this year?”

“Malfoy was all words,” said Hermione.

“Malfoy’s not bad,” Harry had said quietly, looking up from his plate now to meet his friends’ eyes. “At the very least, he could make me laugh.” And he’d smiled a little, remembering that day. He’d never told anyone else about it.

The orange tank he’s wearing now is short, enough so that the breeze lifts it up a little at the hem and runs across his navel. When he sees a muggle on the street looking at him, he reminds himself that he feels comfortable, and beautiful. Homey in his own body. Heck, maybe the woman is just wondering why he’s standing on the sidewalk outside 11 and 13 Grimmauld Place with his hands out like he’s embracing the wind. He decides the latter and gives the muggle a small smile, waiting for her to be well on her way down the street before stepping up to the house between 11 and 13.

_Knock knock kn—knock knock. Knock—_

“Good afternoon, Harry!”

When his godfather answers the door, he shows up before Harry with smears of gold paint on his nose and in his hair, pinned back in a loose bun. “We’re fixing the place up,” Sirius says before Harry has the chance to do anything aside from tilt his head. “Or, well, we’re painting,” Sirius amends. He glances back into the hallway stretching out behind him into his family’s old house. “It always looked so dark, didn’t it? Even when the Order cleaned everything.”

“It did,” Harry agrees. Already the house looks brighter, half-painted with golds and yellows instead of emeralds and grays.

“Merlin, it’s nice out,” says Sirius. He seems to come more alive in the sunlight that streams inside through the doorway. Turning his head, he calls down the hallway, “Remus, we ought to open some windows! It’s lovely outside!”

Harry swears he can hear the exasperation in the other man’s voice as his old professor rejoins, “That’s what I was saying this morning, when the entire building was pervaded with the smell of _wet paint,_ Padfoot.” There’s a smile in there, too, though.

They find Remus in the drawing room, already with the long windows facing the street drawn up to let the air inside. The furniture is all moved to one side of the room, with plastic covering the floors. “Hello, Harry,” the man says kindly. He reaches up to move a piece of hair from his eyes with a hand also holding onto a paintbrush, miring his forehead with gold in the process. “You haven’t been over in a while, it feels like.”

“Work,” Harry says, apologetic.

“You look nice today.” He smiles, a small, awkward thing that makes Sirius and Remus exchange a grin, too.

“Thanks,” says Harry. They put so much effort into making him feel special; it’s embarrassing, a little, but mostly it just makes him feel unabatingly happy. He gives the wall Remus is standing beside a second glance, blinking. “Wasn’t your family tree right there?” he asks, turning to look at his godfather.

Sirius tosses him a wink with one narrow eye, his dark lashes fluttering. “This is where we went wrong cleaning up last time. We tried to _remove_ the permanent sticking charms adhering all my family’s crap to the walls.”

“We’re just painting over it,” Remus finishes, waving his brush.

Harry tilts his head, and his dreadlocks fall on one side, grazing his shoulder. “Isn’t there a spell for that? A color charm, or a transfiguration spell, or something?”

“That’s the first thing we tried,” says Remus. He and Sirius exchange another glance, this one more awkward than the last.

“Didn’t really work out,” Sirius sums up brusquely. “Would you like to help, Harry?”

Which is how he ends up standing before the portrait of some old relative of his godfather’s, paintbrush in hand. A bucket of white paint sits at his sandaled feet.

“At first we thought we’d cover them up with paintings, or _Jurassic Park_ movie posters, or something,” Sirius had said. “But Moony thought we ought to just paint over them ourselves. He’s very _poetic.”_

Harry kind of hopes he’ll have a relationship with someone someday like Remus and his godfather do here at Grimmauld Place. The two of them are somewhere between best friends and lovers; Harry doesn’t even know which they are, and it seems like a beautiful place to be in with someone else.

He paints over the surface of the portrait next, frame and all, until the whole thing is white and shiny wet. He’s happy the man in the portrait is gone for the moment, because even when he’s gone Harry still feels like he’s blocking him inside, à la _The Cask of Amontillado._

“Where do they go?” he asks Remus in the drawing room. “The people in the portraits?”

The man doesn’t laugh at the question; he takes Harry seriously, which the latter has always appreciated of the older man. He gives the wall where the Black family tree previously was displayed a long look, and Harry watches him. He thinks of Remus as his other godfather, and sometimes just of him and Sirius as his uncles. For the most part, he’s looked up to them, and what they’ve done with their lives. They’re brave—Harry has always wanted to be, but he’s still not sure that he is. He does mad things sometimes, but it could just be that he’s that unfortunate, or foolish. Or just mad.

The gold paint on Remus’s face both shines on and contrasts with his brown skin, a product of his mother’s family being from India. His parents had met there, and moved back to England later, after he’d been bitten. Hogwarts had sent a letter promising accommodation and help with Remus’s condition. They were cautious at first, but found Albus Dumbledore to be a kind man, and, more importantly, helpful. He was the only help that had ever came through with the werewolf thing.

 _There are stories written in our skin,_ Harry thinks. _In our features, our blood, our color. And that’s how our families live on. The Blacks had it wrong, sort of. They put everything on the walls._

Remus turns away from the wall and says, “They weren’t people, Harry. They were portraits.” There’s somewhat of a sad look on his face, despite the fact that he’s smiling faintly. “I suppose it doesn’t matter.”

Despite utilizing muggle supplies for the painting, Sirius and Remus still use their wands to dry it prematurely. “Only because he doesn’t like smelling wet paint,” Sirius adds, elbowing the other man. Moony just rolls his eyes.

Harry finds himself back at the portrait he’d painted over earlier, which still looks like a waiting canvas, somehow. Blank and white. Getting an idea, he casts a color change spell on the nearest bucket of paint and picks up a brush. It doesn’t look so dissimilar to his wand. For a while, he just thinks of colors, and feels peaceful.

Remus and Sirius don’t find him until he’s finishing. Harry’s no good at art; he’s said it before, but the picture he’s painted over the old Black portrait still makes him proud. Maybe not so much of his drawing skills as of the subject herself.

“Tonks,” says Remus quietly, surprised. For a moment he seems overcome with emotion, and Sirius latches an arm around the man’s waist. Moony leans on Padfoot, looking at Harry’s messy portrait of a woman with hair the color of pink bubblegum. They don’t talk for a minute.

Harry remembers her for an instant—Tonks, sitting next to him at the table at Christmas dinner, the ends of her hair shifting in length and color and texture along with her mood. “I envy you,” Harry had admitted, his voice blending into the louder din of the Weasley’s long table. “You can be whoever you want to be. Or you can look like yourself, if that makes sense… What you are—“

He gestured at his heart, or his chest. “Inside, I guess.”

Her face softened. Not in appearance, but in expression. “Harry,” she’d just said, and put a comforting hand on his shoulder. _That’s enough,_ he’d thought. That was all he needed, her caring, to be okay. But she was even better than just a word, of course.

“Close your eyes,” she’d said, and when he had, she went, “What are you now?”

Without seeing himself Harry felt better; for a moment, he imagined that he had no appearance, and then that it was different, more feminine, or maybe more masculine, or maybe more of something else. He almost believed, then, that he wasn’t just a boy wearing ill-fitting wizard’s robes, but a person, no pronouns, no expectations, no judgments on other’s parts based off of his looks, because they _weren’t there._ Not then. He was himself, in the darkness behind his eyelids, because there he was everything and nothing, just a person, and nothing more or less. Human.

He smiled at Tonks, in the dark with him. “I’m Harry,” he said simply. His definition wasn’t solely “wizard”, or “the boy who lived”, although those two things certainly were part of him. The boy and girl thing, though—those were the things that fucked with his head. He didn’t feel like either. But Tonks had been happy just to talk with Harry, the person. He’d loved her for that. They all had.

He’d opened his eyes, and the rest of the conversation in the room fell in around him like a sea collapsing in on an island, his island, and the world was colorful and bright and merry. If there were any troubled thoughts running through his head when he glanced down to find his chest still flat, his body still lanky, still all dressed up in robes he didn’t particularly like, Tonks made them all disappear, at least while she was still there.

Later she’d taken Harry shopping, and went with him to get his hair done, and taught him charms to change the colors of things. Nice stuff like that. And after that, during Harry’s seventh year that wasn’t even at Hogwarts at all, during the last battle, she’d died.

She was with him now like his parents were. James and Lily were in Harry’s skin, his hair, but Tonks was in his favorite pair of pink high-tops, in the floral crop top. When he dresses the most like himself, he thinks of her.

Harry ends up staying for dinner with Sirius and Remus, and leaves long after, taking the bus back to his flat rather than walking as he had before. By the time he’s gotten to his own apartment building the sky is dark with space. In spite of the London smog, he can still see a few stars.

He breathes, in, out, and takes a moment to take them in. Goes inside and hikes up the stairs to his flat. He is met by a blur of black and blue.

A hand takes him by the upper arm, encircling it but not grabbing it, and another is on the back of his neck, pulling him forward. He’s about to wrench himself away, or he thinks he is, but he already knows who’s grabbing onto him, pulling their faces close together. He lets Draco kiss him, and when his eyes flutter closed, there is nothing but him and the man holding them close together.

Harry is only a person, nothing more, nothing less. The rest of it, in this instant, is insignificant. He thinks of the stars.

5\. draco

There’s no real reason that Draco can think of as to why he came back here and not just to his flat—he has a place to stay now, and he’s not alone. But it’s the only thing he can do, the only place he _wants_ to go, after telling his father. When he apparates away, Harry’s old place is where he ends up.

He knocks, but no one answers, and he really ought to leave, yeah, because who knows when Harry is coming back, or if he even still lives here, but once he’s made it there his feet are too tired to drag themselves anywhere else. Apparition would take too much out of him, he thinks, and ends up sitting by Potter’s door, his knees pulled up to his chest. He is a ball—a condensed form of himself, spherical pitifulness.

He and Blaise had sat outside the Malfoy’s gate for a while afterward, leaning on the iron bars and getting their legs damp with dew.

“You okay, man?”

“I don’t know.” Draco flexed his fingers, looked different places. “That just… happened.”

Blaise nodded slowly. “Yep.”

Quiet. What was there to say? Draco had just sort of… walked off. Blaise watched, seemed to realize that he’d wanted to be alone for a bit. And it had been nice, to walk for a while. He followed a different path than the one he’d used to leave Malfoy Manor the last time. Summoned a quill and ink and drew doodles of the sky and the sun on his left arm. It helped a little.

He’d recognized after a period of that, though, that he wasn’t getting any better. Like this morning, he knew he was supposed to be somewhere else, wherever that was. He’d apparated. Now, he’s here in the hallway again. It makes sense, in hindsight. In a second, he can see the future, or _a_ future, anyway. A possibility.

He hopes it works out.

His nose is a little red, and his eyes a bit wet, yeah, but he really is fine. It wasn’t as if he’d _expected_ his father to smile at him and hug him like his mother had.

_It’s a beautiful door, he’s not gonna lie, intricate designs cut into shining oak. Malfoy Manor. If nothing else, it’s pretty, though in a cold way, to him. The door opens up in moments, and then he’s standing in front of his mother._

_“Um, yo,” he says carefully. He realizes, looking at her, how much he’s missed having her around. When was the last time he even talked to someone other than Blaise, or that one cute man with the beard working at the organic foods store?_

_“Draco,” his mother says, and her voice breaks his heart a little. Merlin, he should’ve written. No, visited. Told her earlier._

_There’s always been space between him and his parents, between him and Narcissa. He goes in for a hug anyway, although it’s an awkward, halfway sort of thing that causes both of them to feel strange inside. It feels sort of nice._

_Some mechanism in his brain tells him that sooner is better than later, to get it over with quickly, like ripping a bandage off of a wound. Before he’s really decided to, he’s mumbling, and then clearing his throat to say it more clearly._

_“I just wanted to stop by and tell you I’m gay,” comes spurting out his lips, and shit, that was so badly phrased, he thinks in a panic. You couldn’t have given her a minute, went inside the house first? Asked her to take a seat?_

_“Damn, I mean—um—“_

_He feels like his mother deserves the truth, though. Compared to his father, at least, she’s been an okay parent, and one who’s loved him, at any rate. She shouldn’t have had to wait so long for him to tell her, because she…_

_Doesn’t mind._ Doesn’t mind? _“Yes,” his mother says, reaching out to lift his chin with her fingers so that their gazes lock, hers steady, his, steadying despite his nervousness. “You are, aren’t you?” For a minute Draco isn’t sure if she’s actually okay with it, but then she gives him a small smile with what is nearly always a pale, cold mask of a face. Now, it’s not. He smiles back._

_Narcissa straightens after that, assuming the traditional deprecating Malfoy air he always figured she learned from her husband. Looking at her now, though, she seems different to him—less cold, and more strong. Kind of like she’s proud of her son. He wonders if she’s always looked that way, or if today is different. Draco’s not crying. Nope. He feels a little like doing it, though._

No, his father hadn’t been so kind. But his mother had done everything.

So when he hears footsteps, and sees Harry for the first time in a year outside of the papers, coming up the staircase, he really can’t be held accountable for his actions, can he? It’s not as if Draco hasn’t wanted to wrap the man in his arms since third year, although he’s only really admitted it to himself in the last few months.

The kiss is a surprise, even to him. But it makes sense, too. _A possibility_. He’s kissed other people before: Pansy Parkinson, once. Blaise, also once. The man working at the organic foods store over by their flat—a few times more than once. But he’d been a muggle, and although Draco could tell him some secrets, he hadn’t felt he could share all of them. So he is single, singular, and as far as the gossip columns in the paper say, so is Harry, unless that’s a secret, too. But he doesn't think Potter would want something like that to be a secret, not unless his partner did.

“You never came back for your scarf,” says Harry, when they’ve finally separated. There are still only inches between them, with Harry against the door and Draco sort of… possibly pinning him there. Not really intentionally. Feeling more than a bit awkward, he gives Harry some space so that he can open his door and like, _breathe._

“I didn’t want to ruin it,” he admits once they’re inside. Harry’s flat looks similar to what it was a year ago, messy, sort of minimalistic, but there’s more color to it now, somehow. Art hangs on the walls, and travel magazines are stacked up on what seems like every surface. There’s a knitting basket by the television, next to a pile of DVDs. _The Hobbit, Star Trek. A Single Man._

“Us?”

“No, more like—that night,” he says. “I don’t know. It gave me the courage to tell some of my friends, to kiss people, to… go out on a limb, I guess.” He runs a hand through his messy hair, grimacing. “I didn’t want to screw up the one thing I _hadn’t_ screwed up so far. And what was I supposed to do? Become your friend?”

 _Shit._ Now that he thinks of it, it sounds like a perfectly rational idea. And he sounds like an idiot. “Actually, maybe just put that all down as me being a dick,” says Draco, frowning at himself. “An awkward, punk of a kid with no job and maybe like, two friends…” He’s staring at Harry too much to count properly, much less to figure out what the definition of a friend is to him.

“It’s okay,” Harry says, and Draco is grimacing, trying to figure out if it actually is. Harry doesn’t look mad, though, just like he wants to understand, ask more questions. They end up on opposite ends of the couch, with Draco making sure that their feet don’t touch in an effort to keep the space between them after he’d so brutally destroyed it. Which they still haven’t really addressed, he thinks.

It’s Draco that breaks the silence, though, despite that effort. Still staring, he says finally, “Harry, you look fucking _beautiful._ I mean.” Harry’s lips are already stretching into a grin. “You look really happy,” he clarifies, his cheeks going pink. “Content.”

“I am,” says Harry. He twists a dreadlock around one finger and seems to take in the whole flat, including Draco, for a moment, breathing it all in and then back out. Without Harry the living room and kitchenette area might be nice looking; with him there, the bouquet has a centerpiece, and it accents Harry. He _glows._

And Draco feels out of place in all of it, until Harry’s toes graze his, and the contact links him in with the rest of the room. It makes his heartbeat jump, skipping over a beat that should have been, but it’s comfortable, too. He was last year, too, he thinks. Being comfortable with another person, not having to be afraid of what they’ll do next, is… nice. Draco appreciates that. He looks down at their feet, white against brown, their big toes lined up to match. Harry’s feet are a little bigger than his. _Possibilities._ He doesn’t want Harry to stand up and move away from the couch, just wants him to stay there so they can be _them._

“Hey,” he says after a minute, unsure how to phrase his question. He dives in, asking, “Do you still use the same pronouns and all that? He, him, his? I mean, how did it… go? What you were trying to figure out last year?” He laces his fingers together, a nervous gesture.

“He or they,” says Harry. “I’m okay with either.” He cracks a smile. “Honestly, as long as you’re not calling me a freak, and being polite…”

“Have people done that?” asks Draco. He’ll punch the shit out of them. Hexing them would be more rational. He doesn’t want to be rational.

“There’s always some. It went well,” Harry says simply. His demeanor goes soft. His gaze slides over Draco, seeming to take him in for the first time. “You kept my shirt,” he says, smiling still.

“I figured it’d match the scarf.”

Harry rolls his eyes. “Black matches everything; of course it would.”

“Well damn, I forgot I was talking to fucking Spencer Hart over here.”

“I was serious about that, by the way,” says Harry. “I actually did knit you a bloody scarf, and figure you’d stop by when you didn’t owl; I had it ready, and I almost mailed it to you over Christmas, but I figured you were keeping your distance…” He doesn’t even look offended, just sort of amused, maybe a bit miffed, if anything. Draco still feels guilty as shit for never owling.

“I swear I’m not actively _trying_ to be a dick,” he says, grimacing, wringing his hands. “I’ve been trying not to, actually, since we… yeah.”

Harry seems to notice that he’s dancing around the reference to a year ago, and doesn’t point it out, thankfully. He does see the rest of it, though, and leans forward across the couch to look at Draco more intently, more closely. “Your eyes are red,” he says.

They are. Draco smiles, but it’s more of a sad, dead thing than like one of Harry’s self-accepting ones. “My father is an asshole,” he says quietly, again, and of course it’s then that one stupid tear waters up in his eye and rolls down his cheek. Harry catches it with his thumb and wipes dry the wet stain running down Draco’s face. He stays there, hovering over Draco like the antithesis of a shadow. Light shows behind his eyes, shining through the green.

Draco crosses the line again, and puts two awkward, misplaced-feeling arms around Harry. His gesture is quickly returned, and then… they’re hugging. Harry is very warm.

“He didn’t even yell,” Draco says, his voice muffled by the other man’s shoulder. “He just… stared. And then told me to never tell anyone what I’d said, that he and my mum would find me a nice woman to settle down with, and—fuck, it was just really, really _bad,_ Harry.” Horrifyingly, his nose is feeling runny now, and he sniffles taking in a breath. Merlin, and he’d actually fucking had this idea of storming in and shagging the daylights out of Potter and then waking up the next morning in bed with him, Harry with his eyes peacefully closed next to him. No, this definitely isn’t that kind of movie, he thinks. Not how things work, not how they’re fixed.

But yeah, being in Harry’s arms is comfortable as hell. He can admit that. The man draws circles into Draco’s back, and he imagines them visible there, like art, with the black shirt as a canvas.

“You left?”

“After I flipped him off and said a similar farewell.”

“Smooth,” mumbles Harry. “Are you feeling okay, though?” There’s understanding in his voice.

Draco considers the question for a minute. “I feel kind of shitty,” he says, “but I feel better, too, with everything out in the open. I’m not lying anymore.” He shrugs inside Harry’s bronze arms, heavy on him like a statue. He’s not sure if he wants to try and worm his way out of the man’s embrace now—he feels a little like he’s being strangled by a boa constrictor, and ha, parseltongue jokes; that makes him smile a little. Instead, he lets himself be squeezed into a more compact, warmer form of himself.

“Wait, can you _breathe?”_ Harry says, moments later.

“That’s questionable,” Draco answers, and then they’re separating again and he actually _can._

“You have tell me these things, man!”

“Thank you,” he says, meaning it. “For not being a dick when I first told you, even though I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

“No problem.” Harry smiles. Looking down at Draco’s arm, he adds, “I like your doodles.” They’re a little smeared with sweat, from hugs. There’s a bit of ink on the couch cushions. Neither of them seems to mind.

6\. harry

Harry wakes up in pieces, having to take a few moments to recollect how exactly he ended up with Draco Malfoy strewn across his chest. There’s no moment where he jumps, wondering how the hell this happened—no, it’s a little surprising immediately, and even then, pleasantly so. Draco Malfoy is asleep on Harry’s living room couch, wearing his old clothes, and their limbs are tangled up like yarn, two shades of brown knitted together into one breathing, happy mass.

He can lift one of his hands without disturbing the man lying on top of him, next to him, kind of both, actually. He touches a strand of Draco’s hair, an almost white shade of blond, and smiles at it.

“So this is _that_ kind of relationship now, isn’t it?” says Malfoy without opening his eyes. He looks at peace, so Harry doesn’t move any further than to continue playing with the man’s hair.

“‘That’ is a very ambiguous term,” says Harry. He starts braiding Draco’s hair, appreciating it. “You mean dating?”

Draco opens his eyes, and they’re gray, very gray, like molten metal and skyscrapers, but mostly Harry just thinks of the sea. “I want to draw you,” the man says.

“I’d like to draw you, too,” says Harry, “but I take it yours would turn out much nicer.” To balance it out, he gets his camera from his room and takes a picture of Draco on the couch, his hair messy from Harry playing with it and morning on his features. He usually just uses the camera for photographing places, streets and cliffs and buildings, but, he reasons, Malfoy is kind of a place, too. He’s a moving island.

Draco, in turn, settles Harry back on the couch. He’s wearing what he was yesterday, having never changed, except that he has Malfoy’s green sweatshirt on over his floral tank. Draco rolls his eyes when he notices that Harry grabbed it along with the camera. The man settles himself on a chair taken from the kitchen, parchment and pencil in hand found earlier in Harry’s room.

Harry watches as his pale hands flatten out the paper, as one sets to sketching. Draco’s eyes flick back and forth between his subject and the drawing. He feels the sensation of time bending, not sure if it’s slowing down or speeding up as Draco looks at him, and he looks at Draco, and his toes, and his knees, and the window. He watches the sun rise, imperceptibly slow, but still moving. He tries to see it move.

“This is like _Titanic,”_ he says after a few minutes. “You sure you don’t want me to undress or something? I don’t have any blue diamonds or anything, but I could wear a scarf or other rectangular knitted item…”

Malfoy rolls his eyes when they’re not darting back and forth between the page and his muse. “It’s eight in the fucking morning, Harry; are you really that eager to get naked with me?”

Harry shrugs and goes, simply, “Yes.” He watches as Draco’s face goes red, like someone had brushed the color across his cheekbones with powder or paint. He grins, seeing the man sputter out phrases, or try to, anyway. “It was sort of a joke,” he starts, then pauses and says instead, “There wasn’t a point to lying. I like being honest with people. And I can be honest with you, I think, so…”

“A little more subtlety, perhaps,” Draco offers. His hand stutters across the parchment, pencil faltering.

“Does it make you uncomfortable, me saying things like that?”

The man shakes his head. “Au contraire, it does the very opposite, but, as previously stated, it’s _eight a.m.,_ Harry. I haven’t even cooked breakfast yet.”

Harry lifts his head to meet the man’s eyes. “I’m getting free food out of this, too?”

Draco gives him a small smile. “Making up for lost time.”

“Please just stay here,” Harry says. He’s not sure if he’s serious or not; he’s not sure what Draco perceives of that, either. The man just shakes his head and smirks and continues to pencil out Harry’s form on the paper, and more time passes, or doesn’t. The sun moves a centimeter, or a thousand kilometers.

7\. draco

Drawing Harry gives Draco time to mull things over in his head. With each stroke of the pencil on paper, he is able to further concentrate his thoughts, condensing them from abstract ideas into labeled emotions into desires into decisions. It’s calming.

In his head, he tries applying different pronouns to the person lying in front of him, on the paper. _I’m in Harry’s flat. It’s a nice place. They have magnets on the fridge from lots of different cities and countries they've visited since leaving Hogwarts. They’re beautiful, and I kissed them. I’m in their flat. Harry’s._

It works, he thinks. He’d use them anyway if they didn’t, if Harry asked. “So,” he says after a period of silence, “um. How have you been, in general?” Once they’re not tossing quips between each other, Draco realizes, conversation is significantly more awkward, although not incredibly so. He can’t exactly just randomly throw a “Hey man, you’re such a dick” out there, though. Out of context, it just sounds rude and unoriginal.

Harry considers the question for a moment, and Draco appreciates that they make a point not to move except for their eyes. He himself is not looking at the paper so much anymore as taking in his subject, and hoping whatever the hell his hand is doing is at least a little bit artistic.

“For all the bad days there have been better ones,” Harry offers. A single dreadlock is hanging down to obscure one of his green eyes, something that would drive Draco mad and leave Harry himself entirely ambivalent, apparently. It seems a fitting enough contrast between them. “I passed the auror tests a while ago.”

Draco snorts. “They actually made you take them?”

Harry smiles slightly. “Yeah, but I feel like I’d have passed even if I’d gotten a record low score, you know?”

“It makes the ministry look a hell of a lot better,” Draco assumes. “Compared to before, I mean.” They’d kind of taken a bit of a one-eighty, he considers, remembering the wanted posters with Harry’s face stuck up everywhere. Now, his face is still everywhere, but… more _positively._ He smirks at the thought.

His muse rolls their eyes. “I make everything look better,” they say, and the two of them burst out laughing.

“I can’t even bloody disagree with you,” Draco says, shaking his head. “Damn, Potter, who knew you were such a conceited prick? Save a little for me, will you?”

“A little _conceit,_ or…?”

He shoves his drawing in Harry’s direction rather than rejoin to the man’s shitty jokes, and thinks of a year ago, and considers how things have changed since then. He considers that they haven’t changed at all.

“I kind of screwed up the feet,” he mumbles, not sure whether he wants to stare at Harry as he looks at the thing, or at the floor, at his own pale toes.

“Surely you can be more conceited than that,” Harry says, catching his eye. “Draco, this is, like… super rad!”

“My goal in life, of course. To be super rad.”

“Your radness is increasing exponentially,” the man informs him. “Can I put this on my fridge?”

“By all means,” Draco answers, “tape it up. Gaze upon your beauty every time you open the fridge for a snack.” His mouth teeters between a smile of the nervous sort and the content sort.

“I thought y _ou_ were making breakfast.”

He rolls his eyes and pulls at Harry’s hand. “You can get off the damn couch now, bruv. _You’re_ going to help me with it.”

The man gets up easily, and doesn’t let go of Draco’s hand. In a moment the two of them seem to think of the same thing, both looking down at their fingers intertwined. Considering. Draco thinks of yarn knitted together, of two colors in a palette mixed into one, both separate entities and shades and a new, different thing when locked together. Harry takes his other hand, and then they’re just standing there by the couch. Holding hands. Four of them. It feels more intimate, in some ways, than kissing, Draco thinks. Harry’s hands are warm.

“I like the magnets on your fridge,” says Draco.

Harry releases his hands. “I’m gonna go get your scarf,” they say abruptly, and disappear. Draco closes his eyes so that when he opens them again, Harry’s back, and it’s like they were never gone. Harry gives him a curious look, but Draco doesn’t explain, feels like it would ruin whatever magic is here, other than the obvious sort. He just opens his eyes when he feels the weight of Harry’s knit scarf around his neck.

He looks down at it and laughs. “It really is green and gray.” It’s warm, too, maybe too much for June, but he doesn’t mind it.

“Dammit, Malfoy, I  _told_ you that,” says Harry. He’s still holding onto the ends of the scarf, linking them together through the fabric. They’re still for a moment again, processing things again, trying to figure out just what they’re doing, what they’ve begun. Draco’s not entirely certain, but he doesn’t mind this confusion. It’s not a panicked thing like worrying about identity or parents or Lord bloody Voldemort and his shit. It’s an adventure about to happen, more like. He’s like Bilbo Baggins, but like… less reluctant.

He’s entirely looking forward to stepping into the kitchen with Harry, hand in hand, to figure out what the hell they’ll be making for breakfast.

8\. harry

Draco tells him later, another week, when they’re out walking in the evening, “It was my birthday when we met. I mean, not the first time at Hogwarts on the Express, but… the better one.”

Harry smiles a little. “The better one?” he echoes.

“Because the first time was pretty shitty, and all. Mostly because of me.”

“Well, you’ve made up for it.”

“Naturally,” scoffs Draco. He flips his hair, longer and blonde, over his shoulder. Without gel in it it looks a little wavy, and Harry loves it even more than usual. “You have a beautiful artsy pretty boy boyfriend; what wouldn’t that make up for it?” There’s a little sadness in his eyes, and they look grayer, but Harry doesn’t think he can do anything about that part that was harmed in the man by Voldemort, by others. He takes a strand of Draco’s hair and tries to rub positive energy into it, and Malfoy just gives him an amused look, starting to get used to Harry’s odd habits. Harry likes that idea, of them growing accustomed to each other.

He pictures them in twenty years again, and this time it’s different than the last visualization at King’s Cross. He kind of hopes things will keep changing. Maybe, he thinks, they’ll just get better. He suspects that they will.

“I feel okay,” he says to Draco, and it’s a random sort of thought, but the man seems to understand what he means immediately. Things are okay, and it’s nice.

“All is well, and all that,” says the man, and his eyes sparkle. His smile is infectious.

In this, Draco is his mirror.

**Author's Note:**

> on tumblr @enterprisecaptainoikawa


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